Ch. my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 2 my pack erased me, the lycan king didn’t 2

Chapter 2 

Let me tell you how a girl disappears inside a house full of wolves. 

Slowly. Then all at once. 

Month one, I still fought. 

I caught my mother outside the kitchen and made my voice light, the way she likes it. 

“Mom. Can we do our Sunday? Just us. A run by the lake, terrible movies, that greasy diner you pretend you hate.” 

Since I was nine, Sundays had been ours. She used to write down everything I said in little notebooks. Every color I 

liked. Every song. Every stupid opinion. That’s how she knew about the midnight blue. 

“I’m busy,” she said, already walking away. 

I asked her twelve times in three months. I kept count in my phone, because I’m the kind of broken that keeps receipts. 

Then she stopped answering at all. 

Month two, I gave up on my brothers. 

Marcus said, “Not now.” Liam said, “Swamped, kid.” Gabe didn’t even look up. Ryder, who taught me to shift for the first 

time, who let me sleep curled up on his floor in wolf form after nightmares until I was twelve, put both hands on my 

shoulders, moved me out of a doorway like a lamp, and kept walking. 

Month three, the pack’s head warrior stopped training me. 

“Orders, Miss Ashford,” he told his boots. 

He’d called me Little Moon since I was six. 

Month four, I moved out of the packhouse. 

There’s an old hunting cabin at the far edge of the territory. One room, a woodstove, a window that looks at nothing but pines. I swept it out, dragged in a mattress, and stole a kettle nobody would miss. 

“Let’s see how long it takes them to notice,” I told the empty room. 

I lived there eight months. 

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Nobody noticed my closet emptying one hanger at a time. I’d sneak into my own bathroom to shower and leave like a burglar in my own home. 

Chapter 2 

I got very good at being invisible. Nobody warns you it’s also a wound. 

The night I broke was my father’s birthday feast. 

+45 Coins 

I wore my best dress. I sat at the high table. My father raised his cup of mead and said, “To my children. The future of 

this pack.” 

And then he named five. 

Marcus. Liam. Gabe. Tobias. Ryder. 

The sixth chair was full. The sixth child was holding a fork. 

I walked outside and threw up in my mother’s rose bushes in a two–thousand–dollar dress. 

That was the night I opened my father’s vault. 

Every Ashford Alpha keeps the Pack Chronicle. Leather, older than the house. Births, first shifts, matings, deaths. Every 

wolf’s life, in the Alpha’s own hand. 

I’ve known the combination since I was ten. My mother’s birthday. Of course it is. 

My page was near the back. Last entry, dated the night of my ceremony. 

21. turned 21. Bond rejected by Hale. No further action. 

No further action. 

Not she’s the fastest runner in the pack. Not she graduated top of her class. Not our daughter was torn apart in front 

of three hundred wolves and we did nothing. 

I was a line in a ledger. 

I almost closed the book. Then I noticed something. 

The page right before mine had been torn out. Cleanly. With a blade. And on the stub that was left, one letter, in my 

grandfather’s handwriting. 

We have no wolf in our family whose name starts with R. I know every name in that book. I’ve known them my whole 

life. 

Somebody had been cut out of the Ashford Chronicle. Just like somebody was being cut out of the pack. 

Chapter 2 

“Do I really mean that little to you?” I whispered to the dark. 

Nobody answered. Nobody had in months. 

So I went back to my cabin and typed in a name wolves only ever say quietly. 

Draven. 

+45 Coins 

Every pack in North America answers to the Alpha Council. And the Council answers to one wolf. Kael Draven. The 

Lycan King. Bigger, older, and stronger than any Alpha alive, ruling from a black stone hall in the Cascade Mountains. 

When two packs are about to go to war, his Wardens walk in and walk out with a treaty instead of a funeral. 

Twelve recruits a year. Anonymous trials. They never take Alpha daughters, because Alphas handle their own. 

So I applied under my grandmother’s name. S. Wilde. 

Eleven nights of tests. Tracking. Memory. Pack law nobody writes down. Impossible scenarios where you choose 

which wolf dies. 

I hit submit and waited to be rejected. Again. 

Eleven days later, the black envelope. 

Tell no one. 

I laughed out loud in an empty cabin. 

Who exactly did they think I had left to tell?